The present invention relates generally to the field of transportation, and more particularly to passenger safety while using mobile devices during travel.
There has been an increasing number of automobile accidents involved with the use of mobile device (e.g., smartphones, etc.) by the driver of the vehicle. Although, there have been recent contributions made in the area of reducing driver distraction such as by allowing mobile users handling their mobile devices with less effort while driving (e.g., handsfree talking via Bluetooth, etc.). Additionally, there are active efforts in developing driver distraction detection systems and systems that help manage interoperability. One such system uses an acoustic ranging system.
For example, an acoustic ranging system leverages the existing car stereo infrastructure to locate smartphones by exploiting only a single microphone and multiple speakers. This approach is designed to be unobtrusive and leverages ubiquitous off-the-shelf smartphones. A key contribution is its robustness under heavy multipath (i.e., multiple paths and directions of in-car speakers and in-car microphones) and noisy in-car environments. This system differs from typical acoustic human speaker localization, in that, it uses a single microphone and multiple sound sources rather than a microphone array to detect a single sound source.